Let me explain why I admire Lenny Henry
for drying onstage on his press night. I do not think it a case of
first-night nerves for the beloved comic-turned-actor, not even on his
first opening since the announcement of his knighthood (arise, Sir
Lenworth). I think it’s that he doesn’t do patronising.
As alcoholic literature lecturer Frank, tutoring the street-smart but
cloister-innocent hairdresser Rita, he begins by snowing her with
scholarly bilge. I found it notable that on Tuesday evening both a
first line-fluff, then a complete dry which led Henry to exit the stage
for a minute before restarting the scene, involved this kind of arid
jargon. It’s certainly not that Henry doesn’t understand it; I think on
some level he revolts at treating such a character in such a way. His
performance is much surer when Frank realises the true value of Rita
and is candid in his admiration, even envy, of her.
In Lashana Lynch as Rita he also has a marvellous foil. As skilled as
Henry is at that ill-suppressed grin that makes you wonder whether he
is truly on the verge of corpsing or is just a highly skilled actor
(quite likely both), so Lynch has a gift for cracking wise and then
fracturing into unease or diffidence, showing both faces of Rita within
a couple of seconds. Later, when she is first seduced by the student
lifestyle then ultimately finds her own voice and the identity she has
been seeking throughout, Lynch gives a nuanced and complex portrait.
The casting of two black actors changes the focus of Willy Russell’s
classic 1983 two-hander slightly from the Pygmalion (or, as Frank would
have it, Frankenstein) theme, and makes Michael Buffong’s production
also about the colonisation of knowledge itself. Just as Frank sees
Rita as his creation, as if she cannot be her own maker, so part of us
cannot help looking at the exaggerated Victorian-gothic don’s room and
the very subject of literature, and re-evaluating this hitherto
white cultural province in the
light of the protagonists here. It is not overcooked, simply left to
simmer aromatically. Even Henry’s resemblance, in modest Afro, to a
middle-aged Wole Soyinka makes a discreet point.
Written for the Financial
Times.